


it's the fighters who survive

by immortalcockroach (juggyjones)



Series: in this universe, we're fighters [7]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Claustrophobia, F/M, Gabriel and Octavia Have a Conversation, Missing Scene, Panic Attack, slight angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-06 02:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20283553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juggyjones/pseuds/immortalcockroach
Summary: ‘I wasn’t prepared for it, but nobody was. I won their trust and they believed what I said. And not everybody lived.’‘Do you regret it?’‘Sometimes.’ She thinks about her answer – it came naturally, and she was surprised to find it’s true. ‘The Ark, living under the floor, that’s horrible enough. But being in charge of the bunker, of hundreds of people… That’s the thing I’d never wish on my worst enemy.’---or, while gabriel and octavia are stuck in a bunker during their search for clarke, they talk about a different bunker octavia was trapped in.





	it's the fighters who survive

**Author's Note:**

> the prompt i got was "missing scene of a conversation between gabriel and octavia about the years in the bunker", only i expanded it a little bit.

Sanctum, if you stop to think about it, is a scary place. Octavia isn’t familiar with its flora nor fauna, and the geographical territory itself poses a challenge she can’t easily overcome. When she was with Dizoya, looking for Gabriel, they got lucky – it seems that here, all paths lead to the Anomaly.

That’s why she’s happy Gabriel is there to take the lead on the search for Clarke – and Bellamy, essentially. Octavia knows that if Clarke’s in trouble, Bellamy won’t be far behind, and she might make amends with two people given she is presented with the opportunity. Besides, it feels good to not need to fight for control. Gabriel knows what he’s doing and she’s absolutely out of her depth, and admitting it somehow lets her breathe again.

‘How much further till we reach Sanctum?’ she asks.

They just took a break from driving through the bushes on a bike and, honestly, Octavia really likes bikes. It’s a bit clumsy and too fast sometimes, but she likes the buzz and the thrill and the adrenaline and she feels a different kind of powerful on it.

In charge, but responsible for herself only.

‘We’re not going to Sanctum,’ answers Gabriel. ‘We’re coming close and searching the area around it.’

Octavia purses her lips and refrains from rolling her eyes. ‘Same thing.’

Gabriel just glances at her.

‘What? I don’t know what we’re doing, or where we’re going. To me, that’s the same thing. I’m not used to being in a vast, open area where everything looks the same, okay?’

Something behind them buzzes and Octavia is glad that she has an excuse not to look at Gabriel. For the split moment they had eye contact when she was saying those words, she could feel his interest rising, already on the verge of asking questions about her statement. She whips her head around to look for the source of the buzzing, but Gabriel’s already on it.

‘What’s happening?’

He’s crouching next to what looks like a wooden stick with a metal box on top, just barely peeking out of the ground. It’s giving off flashes of red light, but Gabriel doesn’t look concerned. A little rattled, if anything, but that’s all.

Octavia gets off her bike, fumbling a bit until she gets it to stand. ‘Are we in danger?’

‘No,’ Gabriel says. He pushes the rod back under the ground and looks at her in the passing. ‘Just need to be cautious. Get back on your bike. We need to take cover.’

She does as told. ‘Is it the Sanctum guards?’

‘Yeah,’ he grunts. ‘Follow me.’

It takes them about five minutes of a bit quieter ride to a place that doesn’t seem out of ordinary. Octavia looks around – there’s bushes, tall grass, trees, odd flowers here and there, and even more bushes. The grass might be a bit prickly once she’s off her bike, but that’s about it.

Gabriel turns off his engine and the silence is almost deafening. For Octavia, it feels as if she’s constantly listening for sounds of danger, and she can’t fight off the instinct to keep glancing around, checking for movements. All that moves is Gabriel. He’s looking through the bushes, crouching as he moves. In a way, Octavia is fascinated by the man. He is tall, and he is noticeable in a way that not many people are, but he’s not menacing. He moves like he knows every inch of the world around him and the world moves back, and she hasn’t seen someone move like that since… since Lincoln.

Her heart aches a little.

Octavia clears her throat. ‘Can I help?’

‘Go through the bushes, there should be a wooden door,’ he answers, oblivious to the thoughts racing through her head. ‘We need to hide.’

‘Okay.’

She crouches, into the prickly bushes, and starts going through them with complete disregard to the pain. If anything, it helps to keep the thoughts at bay.

A minute later, Gabriel calls out to her. ‘I found it, get in while I put away the bikes.’

‘Okay.’

He’s still crouching when she walks over, and he looks a little pissed of with how long she’s taking. _Fair enough_, she thinks. Gabriel’s eyes only graze hers as she climbs through the small entrance, and he’s gone as soon as her whole body is underground.

She takes a ladder into the safe place. It’s warmer in here than the rest of Sanctum and the air is incredibly stuffy, but that’s the least of Octavia’s concerns. The place is tiny – about the size of the bedroom they had back on the Ark.

Gabriel is outside, fetching the motorcycles, and Octavia is really fucking thankful.

Her pulse is the first to go up; her breathing follows suit. She can almost _feel _the walls on her skin, their moisture and the messy stones and the smell of _old_ and the enclosed space between them and –

‘_No_,’ she says. _I will not let this happen._

She moves backwards until her back is pressed against the wall and she spreads her fingers on the moist stones, feeling how slippery they are. How they aren’t moving, not in real life. She forces herself to look at the distance between her and the wall on the opposite end of the room and realize it’s far enough for a dozen people to be comfortable. There is space in this room, there is a way out, and there is space.

The walls are not closing in on her. She’s closing in on them.

Octavia focuses on what’s inside the room itself – a small desk, a chair, and two mattresses that look over a hundred years old. There’s cobwebs and sounds of spiders, and this is nothing like the place she spent the first sixteen years of her life in.

She has nothing to be afraid of.

She can always leave.

When she hears Gabriel’s footsteps coming down the ladder, she releases a breath of relief. Her fingers tremble and a cold shake runs through them, but she brings herself together.

Long enough for Gabriel to come to the last step. Just when she thinks she’s got it under control, he reaches over and pulls down some grass and weeds and branches, and covers the entrance with a metal lid.

Octavia’s heart skips a beat.

She doesn’t remember much of what follows after, but she knows she couldn’t breathe and she only calmed down when Gabriel turned on the lights around the place creating the illusion of more space, and kneeled in front of her, breathing loudly until she started breathing with him.

‘You are going to be all right.’ Gabriel’s hands find hers and he moves his thumbs over the back of her palms, not breaking eye contact even for a second. ‘Just breathe. They can’t find us here.’

_That’s not what terrifies me_, she wishes to say. _I’d rather be out there, fighting for my life, than in here._

Octavia says nothing. Instead, she nods, and listens to the sound of Gabriel’s voice as he talks about something she can’t even focus on. He has a calming voice, though, and Octavia feels herself letting go of her fear. She feels trust budding between them, her trust in him, and she lets it happen. She lets herself believe him when he says she is safe here.

When her breathing is back in her control, her heart beating at a steady pace and the cold sweat dries itself into her skin, she feels a little lighter. Better, but not good.

She takes her eyes away from his, noticing she’s sitting on one of those mattresses. It’s hard and dusty, but it’s easier to look at that than at Gabriel who, for whatever reason, is still holding her hands.

‘Octavia? Octavia, look at me.’ Reluctantly, she does. His eyebrows are raised a little and lips parted, eyes searching for something in hers. ‘Are you going to be okay?’

‘Yes,’ she lies.

‘Okay. Good.’

Whether it’s a lie or he just decided not to question it, Octavia doesn’t know, but she doesn’t mind it. The only thing that bothers her is that where his hands had been on top of hers, she feels a little tingly now.

They spend about a minute sorting everything out, making sure that they covered themselves enough so the Sanctum guards wouldn’t notice them. Gabriel knows how they operate and he talks about it, and it’s a while until Octavia realizes he’s just keeping her mind off of whatever it is that it’s bugging her – and he seems to have realized it isn’t the guards.

Finally, they sit down, each on one of the mattresses.

‘How long do we stay here?’

Gabriel hangs his head, before looking at her. ‘I don’t know. Until the guards have passed.’

‘That’s the buzzing, right?’

‘Yeah.’ He goes on to explain the connection between the buzzing and the guards’ arrival, and Octavia does try to listen, only it all seems a little too technical for her. At the end, he pauses for a bit and lets out a chuckle, shaking his head. ‘Josephine and I used to come down here all the time, at first.’

Octavia shifts on the mattress. She knows things haven’t been good between the two lovers—or anything but murderous, really—but it’s weird to think what she’s sitting on was more than just a piece of furniture. It was a place where people slept, sat, probably had sex, even; it was a place of life. Cramped, small, but it provided them.

‘I used to live in a place not bigger than this,’ she says, quietly. Her gaze drops to the hard stones beneath her feet and she shudders, just a little. ‘My bedroom was a tiny hole in the floor, for sixteen years. Then my bedroom was a jail cell, for a year. And then, I came to the ground.’

Her eyes close and she lets herself reminisce for a moment; the memories of her hiding under the floor, over and over again, they flood her mind but she keeps them at bay. _You can’t hurt me anymore_, she thinks.

With her eyes still closed, she can only feel Gabriel’s eyes on her. He isn’t moving, or saying anything. When one of them isn’t talking, the only sounds are the buzzing from the alarm and the flames from the candles dancing in the soft breeze coming from somewhere.

Octavia’s hands fumble with each other. Her fingers feel cold and a little stiff and she knows that has nothing to do with the weather.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gabriel says. ‘I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone.’

‘My mom and my brother were just trying to keep me alive.’

She looks at him, and for the first time in a while, she doesn’t hide anything. She shows that she is hurting and scared and lonely, and grateful and terrified and all of that at once. She lets him see through the mask she’s worn her entire life, and she knows he sees the quiet kid she’s always been. Not a warrior. A fighter, but not a solider. Someone who manages to stay alive against all odds, but pays the price for that, too.

‘Sounds like the life on the Ark was difficult.’

A chuckle escapes her lips. When they told Gabriel a rough version of how they got to Sanctum, and what happened before, it was a _really rough version. _He was told what he needed to know to stop pestering them. So, it doesn’t really surprise her this is what he thinks, but…

A memory flashes before her eyes. Standing in front of door where her people are locked and to be slaughtered, and instead she slaughters the ones against her people.

‘Life on the Ark was heaven compared to life in the bunker,’ she tells him. Her voice goes deep and dark and her mind goes into a place just the same. ‘Six years spent underground while the planet dies. We run out of food, we use the plants. We run out of food, we—’ Octavia clears her throat. ‘Every day, we woke up knowing it wouldn’t be a surprise if this was out last. We had no way out.’

‘Then how did you—’

‘Clarke,’ Octavia says, ‘and Dizoya. If it weren’t for them, I don’t know…’ She shakes her head, pushing the thoughts away. Her fingers go through her hair and she tries to pull herself together. When she looks over to Gabriel, he is still looking at her. ‘Any news about how long we’re stuck here?’

‘If you would prefer fighting every single Sanctum guard they have available, we can leave now.’

‘Hm. It does sound appealing.’

‘We are not doing that.’

Octavia chuckles. ‘I figured that on my own.’

Gabriel starts leaning backwards until he’s in a reclining position on the mattress, staring at the ceiling. He’s too long to be entirely comfortable in it, Octavia notices. It seems as if he knows this place well enough to feel at home here, but doesn’t like it enough for it to be a good home to him.

Octavia knows the feeling.

Now, when there’s no talking, Octavia beings to wonder what it is about Gabriel that’s making confiding in him so easy and natural – if it’s about him at all. The Anomaly showed her that there’s a different way to go about certain things; that honesty isn’t necessarily a tool of war. For all it’s worth, he seems kind enough not to judge her for who she is like most people do. He’s seen her before the Anomaly, but they’ve truly met each other only after she came back. The Octavia he knows is the Octavia she never had the chance to be.

Just Octavia Blake. Nothing else.

‘Were you a warrior?’ his voice comes out of the blue. ‘In the bunker?’

‘I was their leader.’

He doesn’t say anything for a while. When he finally speaks, there is no judgement. ‘How did you keep everybody alive for so long? You were twenty, right?’

‘Seventeen, going on eighteen,’ replies Octavia. She can almost hear him shudder. ‘I wasn’t prepared for it, but nobody was. I won their trust and they believed what I said. And not everybody lived.’

‘Do you regret it?’

‘Sometimes.’ She thinks about her answer – it came naturally, and she was surprised to find it’s true. ‘The Ark, living under the floor, that’s horrible enough. But being in charge of the bunker, of hundreds of people… That’s the thing I’d never wish on my worst enemy.’

‘What happened?’

‘A lot of things,’ she admits. ‘Bad, good, there was no clear line. We started doing things most would consider inhumane, but we survived because of them. The people I trusted let me bear the consequences on my own. Nobody loved me and everybody feared me. I took the blame, over and over again, because nobody wanted to admit if we hadn’t done the things we have to survive, we wouldn’t have survived. There would be no one to blame me.’

‘Jesus,’ Gabriel mutters, and that’s reaction enough.

‘It wasn’t until my brother came back that I realized what I’ve become. But I couldn’t let go.’

‘Until the Anomaly.’

‘Yeah. Until then.’

‘Why?’

She laughs, and _it’s silly_, she thinks. But they’re not talking about why she didn’t tell her brother she stole candy. It’s not silly.

Her eyes feel heavy when she looks at Gabriel. He’s looking right back at her, with curiosity but something akin to respect, too, and she fights not to look away. ‘I felt that if I let go of that person, I’d just fall apart. My whole life, I’ve just been who people wanted, needed me to be.’

‘Never yourself,’ Gabriel says, and she couldn’t have said it better herself.

‘No. Until now.’

‘The Anomaly?’

Octavia nods. Her fingers are still fiddling with one another and her heart is beating, but she is a fighter – that’s one thing she did for herself, nobody else. She can hold out a little while longer. ‘There’s no point in holding to the person I was. Everybody hates me, but I still have time to make amends.’

‘Is that why you need to talk to your brother?’

She nods again. A smile reaches her face, one that bears more weight than she previously thought she could handle. ‘He’s all I have.’

The weight from her smile shifts into the weight of the words, and it falls atop of both of them.

‘You don’t judge,’ she notes.

He looks away. ‘We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of.’

‘Some more than others.’

‘They weigh on our souls all the same.’

For a moment, she wonders if he’s religious, but she knows he can’t be. He’s too old and he’s seen far too much to be.

In a way, they are not too different from one another. Both isolated, banished, hated by their own people – both trying to redeem themselves.

This is where the conversation ends, but Octavia knows it’s only for now. She can see the curiosity, the despair to _know _that Gabriel has, and she finds herself not entirely opposed to talking to him about it. It feels, almost, as if he could find it in himself to choose understanding over scrutiny. He thinks of himself as a monster, for all the things he’s done, and she can tell – because that’s the feeling that eating her inside out from her core.

They wait in silence, for another few minutes. The beeping ends and they’re on their bikes, ready to get going again. There’s not a lot of time and there’s a lot of ground to cover, and on Sanctum, everything is a matter of life or death.

Gabriel turns on his motorcycle first, revving the speed. ‘Octavia?’

‘Yeah?’

Gabriel hesitates, but only for a heartbeat. ‘I’m glad you trust me.’

‘Me too.’ Hints of a smile crawl up her face and she looks away before he can see it. Her hands twist the key and she revs up the engine, now grinning full-on. ‘Now let’s find Clarke.’

**Author's Note:**

> i'm not a massive octabriel/gabtavia shipper, but i do see a lot of potential in them, so this was fun to write. octavia deserves someone to talk to about this stuff, honestly. 
> 
> how did you like it? or did not like it? as per usual, you can find me on tumblr ([bellarkesgodson](https://bellarkesgodson.tumblr.com/)) and if you want, request a fic.


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